NCAR

This is the first blog post in almost a year. I decided it might be a good idea to keep a blog of some of the adventures Emily and I are doing this summer. I currently am in Boulder, CO, working at the National Center of Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and will be here for 6 weeks. After that, Em and I, and another couple, will be going to Europe for a month. Then later in the summer I have a statistics conference at UC Santa Cruz for a week.

I got here Sunday night around 5:00 pm and was warmly greeted by Sarah and John Pitcher - an older couple that I will be staying with for these six weeks. They are very nice and interesting people and we have already had a couple interesting conversations. They had prepared a dinner for me that night as they figured I would be hungry (which I mostly was, but Em had made me some great food for the flight!). They made some really good pork with some nice fresh vegetables - it was great. They are really into eating fresh and treating the environment well. In fact, overall, Boulder is a very 'green' city. There are recycling bins essentially with every trash can and there are numerous composite bins. It has been pretty hard for me to learn (unfortunately I don't have tons of experience with recycling, besides newspapers) all the ins and outs of recycling. The first day I was here I put a plastic grocery bag in the recycling bin (I know that sounds stupid but to me it made sense) and Sarah quickly corrected me saying that it was trash. Later that day I was going to throw away a plastic ziploc bag and before I could she called from across the kitchen "No you can actually save and reuse those!" So I washed the ziploc bag and put it on the drying rack and reused it the next day. I really do think it is great to recycle and reuse (and I definitely think that in the future I will be much better at it) but sometimes the idea of using soap and other chemicals to wash a little plastic bag (that smells like tuna) seems counter intuitive. Oh well.

I live about 4 miles away from NCAR so I simply walk about a mile to the bus stop and then take a couple buses/shuttles up to the lab. To get up to NCAR you have to go up a pretty steep and long windy road up a mountain. The building isn't as big as I would have thought but it is really pretty up there. You can see all of Boulder and all the surrounding mountains - its really pretty. It would be great place to work full time. Because it is in the mountains, many of the people go on hikes during their lunch breaks. The dress is really informal and most of the people that work there have PhD's in math, earth systems, meteorology, physics, etc. Like most places that I have been to so far in Boulder, there are recycling bins with every garbage can and all the plastic forks, spoons, knives, plates, bowls, and napkins are made from starch (so I think you could actually eat them) so they are biodegradable.

I didn't really know what I was going to be assigned to work on until I got here but now I have good idea of what is going on. I am in the iMage department which has to do with using mathematics to solve geophysical problems. There are a total of 10 people working on this project (which started this week and will go for two years funded by the National Science Foundation). There are four professors, Steve Sain (the man I will work pretty closely with, a statistician who works at NCAR), Derek (don't remember last name, he is a professor at Simon Fraser in Canada), Mike (a astrophysicist who works here at NCAR), and Dr. Reese (my mentor from BYU). Then there are three post docs, Tammy (Phd in Biostatistics at UC Davis), Will (Phd in Statistics from University of Washington), and Martin (Double PhD in Statistics/Earth Sciences from Harvard). Then there is Erika who just finished her masters at BYU, and myself. And lastly there is Peter Schmidt who is about my age and is a computer software engineer that is helping out with all the technical stuff. In a nut shell, we are using data from the magnetosphere which is like the upper upper upper atmosphere that consists of magnetic currents. Apparently the sun emits solar flares which are big charges of energy that hit the earth and cause solar storms (storms in the magnetosphere). These storms influence satellite systems. In fact, just this morning on CNN they ran a story explaining how many people will not have a television signal in the United States for a couple days because of a solar storm that messed up some satellite signals. So we are trying to use atmospheric data to predict these solar storms. On top of trying to make GPS systems more effective by understanding these storms, eventually our conclusions will be transferred to the ionosphere specialists and later to meteorologists that will study our results and how they affect climate change.

Overall I have really enjoyed my time thus far. I think the people that I work with are really interesting and I have really enjoyed the people I am staying with. The only hard part is being away from Em for so long!